Import Better_Mood.db

 Would that I could.

It has become fairly clear to me over the past few days that while I am respected and valued as a member of my team at my current employer, my own mental health has suffered.  I know I did much of it to myself.  Working long hours without any sort of reset or reboot is pretty difficult when the rewards, if any, are invisible.

I do know I was spoiled when I joined the company, ending up working for a great supervisor and an excellent manager.  My supervisor has left the company, and that great manager has been ... laterally moved into a new position which does not place her over me.  And as I have learned over the years, that excellent manager was a top flight spectacular communicator.  We got daily messages letting us know where we stood and how things were going - and most importantly, what her expectations where and how we would be able to meet them.

And then in a few months they replaced all of those supervisors with new ones, and ... well, many corporate culture experts will tell you that the most effective way to destroy high-functioning teams is to make multiple changes which disrupt the culture and the expectations of the team, while not effectively communicating what those changes are designed to do and how your team members may contribute to the continued - one expects - overall success.

And while I am a big fan of my new, current manager, I am not a huge fan of what they've done to the job we had.  And the level of conflicting communication has done absolutely nothing but increase stress.  I do not know where the current process for a key part of my job is now expected to be done, and I've received multiple conflicting messages - some within the same email.

So yeah - my employer is great, we're going through growing pains, and I need to decide either to suck it up and try to help fine tune and make that communication more effective, or shut up and get out of the way.

And I want to help.  Very much so.  But I also want to be damned careful not to step on anyone's toes.  My industry is all about health, and maintaining a healthy work environment is critical.  And I do not want to leave a bad taste in anyone's memory, nor do I want to leap for an exit without a plan and a soft landing zone.  And these days, while there may be many available jobs, I need to take the time to make sure the landing spot I pick is one that I can stick with until I retire.  I cannot afford to continue to job hop.  I'm too damned old.

So I got that going through my head.  And weighing it down is the overwhelming burden of having made a couple of terrible choices for hobbies.

And by that, specifically, I must state that being a woodworker is a terrible thing right now.  A very very long time ago, when I was in college, I learned a difficult lesson.  For you see, two friends of mine who had a dorm room across the hall from my room talked me into building a loft.  That is, I was going to build a platform for my bed, that would rest on long legs over my desk.  If you think of a table, you're pretty much there.

Now, it helps that the dorm rooms we were in had 11 foot ceilings.  And I'm not all that tall an individual.  So I could build a seven-foot-tall platform for my bed, make damned sure to pee before I went into my loft, because it was a hell of a long way down, and I was good for a long time.  And so my friends and I built our lofts.  My friends, both being of construction families, did their lofts much more creatively than I did mine.  I mean, I was a relatively new big-scale woodworker, I'd done small scale miniatures for my mother - that is, doll house furniture - but this was a fairly straight-forward project.  For I needed to build a platform, which was a pair of 3/4" plywood sheets that started four feet wide and eight feet long.  One of the sheets lost a foot on the edge because the entire dorm room was 14 feet from door to wall, 11 feet from floor to ceiling, and 7 feet wide.  And as it came with a "wardrobe" which was a two-foot deep closet, a pair of desks that were 3 feet wide and 5 feet long, and my roommate and I decided we wanted a refrigerator - a fairly large one - and I had also built a 2 foot wide by 2 foot deep by 8 foot tall storage tower with locking, secure lower and upper cabinets, along with a shelf for a television (which we did not have) and a stereo tuner/amp.  

And I suppose I should probably note that, in the spring of 1985, when I was preparing all of these plans, our campus rulebook, otherwise known as the J Book, was the be-all end-all rule book for on campus living.  And it clearly defined all of the requirements that any such student-assembled loft must meet.  Including expected weight bearing, the requirements for support structure, and by far the most critical, which was one was not permitted to create any sort of damage to the walls in the room to install one's loft.  That was, thou shalt not put bolts in the walls.

I was told later that each and every one of those rules had been developed due to an infraction by some unknowing but fiendishly intelligent undergrad who found a new wrinkle to avoid the rules.  Self included.  Yeah.  Just keep reading.

And so my friends and I made the arrangements.  I would build the loft my roommate and I would use, and my friends would build theirs.  On move-in day, my friend who worked for his father's construction company would arrange for the use of one of their larger-capacity trucks so that I could move my loft and my storage cabinet along with his loft and his storage cabinet onto campus, where the third friend and my roommate would meet us as we hauled our structures up four floors into the air to install them in our ... lofty dorm rooms.  No, there was another floor above ours.  

But what my friends, and I, did not do (and I can assure you this has come back to haunt me many times) was to measure the doorways we had to pass stuff through.  Miraculously, almost, the building we were moving into had a single freight elevator which had a doorway that opened to the outside specifically so furniture could be loaded into the elevator and brought to your floor.  While we relied on brute power to transport our projects down hallways and the like, the trip to the floor required the elevator.  And we never measured the door.

And so I can tell you that I learned from pure simple mathematics that day that a seven foot wide platform that was 4 1/4" thick will barely fit through a door that is a little over six and a half feet tall and about four feet wide.  Give or take a little bit.  But if your platform uses a rather fancy setup and is built out of 2x8 lumber (which is actually 7 1/4" wide), your 7 foot wide by 8 foot long platform that is 7 1/4" thick WILL NOT IN ANY WAY AT ALL fit through the same door.  

So while I looked a bit of a genius there, what was absolutely shocking to my friends and I, and to the school's administration, was that nowhere in the Blessed J Book was any sort of statement that explained that if a student was moving into a room with a pre-installed loft, one must not remove the pre-installed loft to install their own.  Erm, well, the problem I ran full head-first into was that the design documents which had been stamped with the university's official approval and had been signed off by the director of campus life safety, clearly stated on the cover page right next to where the stamp was applied the dorm room where they would be installed.  And as the room was not at the end of the hall where unusually-shaped rooms did NOT get pre-installed lofts, the rooms we were occupying had been those with lofts - which we removed and stored off-site when we installed our lofts.

I can assure you that it was during this time in my life I learned that the phrase "you can't fight city hall" was most likely not written by someone who had the power of a mistaken approval on their side.  When my friends and I were directed to reinstall the original lofts, because our new construction was not permitted, and I instead informed the student-employee-inspector that our lofts had been constructed almost exactly to the same specifications as they were designed.  The key deviations were where I switched out 1/4" carriage bolts for 3/8" carriage bolts - that is, 50% thicker, because my chosen source lacked the bolts I needed the day I went to buy them, and thus the deviations rendered the design stronger, and they were, of course approved.

We were directed to a next-day meeting of the life safety committee where in we could appeal the removal ruling - to the head of the Life Safety department who had originally approved the plans, not noting that the rooms already had dorms, and his boss, the overall head of campus life.

And so, when I got to the meeting room, a little early, and noticed an older gentleman setting the room up, my Boy Scout instincts kicked in, and I asked if I could help set the room up.  The older gentleman accepted my offer, had me help him, and then we distributed the name plates around the room.  And when the meeting was called to order, the gentleman who had been setting up the room was the fellow who was sitting behind the nameplate that identified the all-powerful vice president of student affairs.  Otherwise known as the high holy one who would render our decision.

So when the time came to present our case, I shushed the other two fellows, my roommate choosing not to return to campus, so I was paying double-occupancy rate for a single room - that is, I was paying half of what it should have cost - and I made our case rather simply.  I stated "we reviewed the rulebook for construction requirements, followed them, got our designs approved, any deviation from them was to increase the overall structural strength, and here are those plans."  I presented them, and the high holy one turned to his assistant, the head of the Life Safety Department, and said loud enough for everyone to hear "You approved these, and there's nothing in 'the book' that says they can't do them?"  

I swear you could hear us gulp, but not wet ourselves.  Thankfully.

For the other gentleman said "well, I sign a lot of these, I didn't think anyone would rip out an existing loft to build their own." 

"I'm in construction, and worked for a cabinetry shop" said one of my friends.  "I liked the challenge."  

"All right, if the installed lofts are safe and you will reinstall them at the end of the year without damage, you may keep your lofts IF you help us re-write the loft requirements to make it clear that if a loft has been installed in the room by the University, students may not remove university-installed lofts to install their own, no matter how much better the design is."  

As I recall, I think after a little bit of editing, that was how the new sentence read in the 1986 J Book.  And it was also my opening to a loft-building business for a few years.  

But to get back to my point, when I built that loft, I went to the lumberyard and purchased two sheets of 3/4" plywood.  At the time, I was making almost $4 an hour, so investing almost $40 - that is, well over a day's worth of wages - for two sheets of wood, and less than half of the total structure I was to build, was ... daunting.  

Which is where I really want to start to cry.  About fifteen years later, when I built my own daughter a loft of her own, I spent almost $25 for a sheet of plywood.  And moving up to last fall, I was looking at a sheet of 3/4" plywood that would cost me almost $35.  And I was shocked and saddened.  Then I looked at lumber prices last night.  I have been watching what has been happening over the past few months.  Back in February I had talked with my wife about building her a stand-up garden using treated plywood, cedar shingles for trim, and a fair number of treated exterior-grade 2x4s.  Back in my loft-building days, a 2x4 of good quality was around $1.29.  One could find ... "standard" grade "studs" which were 92 5/8" long, which was exactly what one might need for a wall if it was topped and built upon other 2x4s, making it 3/8" short of a full eight feet tall.  If you're fairly normal, unlike me, the last section of your thumb, from fold to the tip of the thumb (not the nail) is likely very nearly an inch long.  Divide that in half, then half again, then take half of that distance, and add it back in - there's 3/8" of an inch.

But anyway, exterior-grade 2x4s had risen last fall to around $4.99 each.  Much more expensive than the $2.99 standard grade stud, but still relatively reasonable.  In mid-March, when we decided, due to her upcoming work schedule, to bag the upright garden idea, 2x4 treated studs had risen to $11.99 each.

And last night, those $35 sheets of plywood last fall have become $64.99 sheets of plywood now.  

So the project I've spent the last few months obsessing over - a new, expanded, much higher quality stand for my table saw, that would require some two sheets of 3/4" plywood went from about $120 to nearly $300 - so bugger that idea.  And a lot of other, smaller projects, I guess.

And yes, should I ever win the lottery, I have many designs for my ideal wood shop, and most of them include a secure, dry, warm lumber storage area and a fair chunk of money to invest in lumber for structural projects.  And some more money set aside for real wood - things like you know what sort of wood it is - walnut, white oak, cherry, rock maple, and other more exotic woods.  Except for coco bolo, which sheds oil to which I've become allergic.  So yeah, there is that minor issue.  But maybe I'll try some messing about with purpleheart, too.  Because it's pretty.  But I'll keep it away from the Cherry.  That would be a bad combination.  Might look good with maple, though.